The National Review Board originally established by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to look at the problem of clerical sexual abuse recently issued its report, including data provided by the John Jay College Study commissioned by the review board, on allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests between 1950 and 2002. Obviously, the sheer size of the numbers involved is almost mind-numbingly tragic. However, to be honest, the principal reason for the review board report as a whole was not to determine the exact statistical extent of the problem. That would be impossible, and in any case exact numbers are not necessary in order to know that there is a serious problem. The real purpose of the report was to gain a better understanding of the problem. From this perspective, although the report is much better than it might have been, it has a serious internal inconsistency which, in my mind at least, robs it of much of its credibility as a possible source of insight on clerical sexual abuse.

The fact that there are really two separate reports involved here is at the center of the inconsistency, although that is not a good reason for the inconsistency, as will be seen. There is the National Review Board's report, which purports to be an extensive written analysis of the problem, and then there is the John Jay College Study, which is a more strictly statistical look at allegations of clerical sexual abuse. Some of the results of this study are quite interesting, and probably the most valuable parts of the review board's report are those in which it cites data from this study. However, the data from the study is not interesting because it is surprising, but rather because it is so utterly unsurprising to many people, and matches so exactly with some views that have been prevalent among faithful and traditional Catholics almost from the beginning of the scandal.

Here is a look at some of the data from the John Jay study, as presented in the review board's report and the executive summary of the John Jay study. (Wherever the words "victims" or "abuse" are used in my summary of the data, they should be understood as referring to alleged victims and alleged abuse, since the John Jay study actually counted allegations. For convenience, the word "alleged" will not be repeated constantly here.) 81% of the victims were male. This contrasts with other studies of abuse in society as a whole, where the majority of victims are female. The percentage of victims who were male increased from 64% in the 1950s, to 76% in the 1960s, to 86% in the 1970s. The number of male victims between 11 and 17 increased by over 500% between the 1950s and the 1970s. 78% of the victims were 11 years old or older when the abuse began. The overall majority of all victims were males between 11 and 17. Compared to the increases in abuse of males between 11 and 17, there was far less variation in the abuse of children under 11, and even less variation in the abuse of girls of any age. In fact, the abuse of girls and the abuse of children under 11 has declined in every decade after the 1960s. The much higher numbers of male victims between 11 and 17 also declined drastically in the 1980s, although still remaining far above 1950s levels. (There was another significant decline in the 1990s, but that decline may not have been as great as it appears, given the probability that some percentage of the recent victims of abuse have not yet made allegations.)

From this data, the primary problem seems abundantly clear: homosexual activity by priests with adolescent boys between 1960 and 2000. This is made obvious in the section of the review board's report summarizing the statistical findings of the John Jay study. However, the review board wrote much of the rest of the report as if this study had never been done, simply ignoring the study that they themselves commissioned, and the clear message that came out of the only organized set of statistics available on the topic of clerical sexual abuse. There is one short section on the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood, which does little more than acknowledge that this is a problem, and that some bishops exclude homosexuals from the priesthood. I suppose I should be grateful that at least the board acknowledged that, but the truth is homosexuality is not just a problem, but seems very close to being the problem. The report says: "It seems clear to the Board that the paramount question in this area must be whether a candidate for priesthood is capable of living a chaste, celibate life, not what that candidate's sexual orientation might be." However, we now have abundant evidence that sexual orientation is closely related to the capability of living a chaste and celibate life, which should not surprise anyone who believes the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church that homosexual orientation is a serious disorder. The results of the John Jay study strongly indicate that homosexuality was directly related to most of the stunning rise in the numbers of clerical sexual abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s, and the lower but still abnormally high numbers in the 1980s. Surely this should at least raise questions that would require greater specific consideration within a 145 page report than a section of less than four pages, which is what the board actually devoted specifically to homosexuality.

Given the data available, many of the final recommendations of the review board simply seem disconnected from reality. It is not so much that the recommendations are bad (although in my opinion some of them do not make much sense). It is more that the recommendations do not directly address the most obvious and basic problem. There is a lot of material here about seminary screening and preparation, and these are important issues, but homosexuality again is mentioned nowhere in the recommendations. The board might claim that they want to leave this matter to the bishops, but the bishops do not necessarily have to do exactly as the review board suggests anyway. That is why these things are called "recommendations." In any case, the board had no problem making definite recommendations in many other areas, so why not in the area that is by any objective measurement the most important area of all?

The board does not exactly ignore the elephant in the room, but after acknowledging the presence of the elephant in the statistical summary, they proceed to discuss the room as if the elephant is just one minor problem with the decor. Moreover, they continue to speak as if the center of the scandal is a topic on which there still might be legitimate differences of opinion. They quote uncritically the statement of one bishop who said "If you're conservative, homosexuality is the problem; if you're liberal, celibacy is the problem." In view of the available evidence, there is simply no excuse for continuing to speak as if this is an ideological issue, rather than an issue of fact. Although thankfully the board does not criticize celibacy, their choice of this as a quote to use is indicative of their whole methodology of pretending that there is legitimate doubt about the primary nature of the problem.

As interesting as the data provided by the John Jay study may be, in a way all of this leaves me wondering what the point was. What have we learned about the roots of the problem that we should not have already known? The fact that homosexuality is a huge factor in the problem had been pointed out by numerous people from the beginning. Still, now at least there should not be any question of scapegoating or blaming anyone here. It is simply statistically the case that, in retrospect, the number one step that the Catholic Church could have taken in the United States to avoid the problems of the last forty years would have been to keep homosexuality out of the priesthood. However, even after the study has been done, many people, including the members of the review board itself, are obviously hesitant to admit the full significance of the data it found.

In the end, of course, the importance of the review board should not be overstated. (One of the more amusing points in the report is the paragraph in which the board talks about Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, who apparently annoyed them by stating the obvious: that the board has absolutely no authority over anybody in the Church, including the bishops.) The fact that the review board report did not deal as forthrightly as it should have with the issue of homosexuality in the priesthood is meaningless in itself, and of no intrinsic importance whatsoever, except insofar as it casts doubt on the credibility and value of the report as a whole. It would have been nice if the board had given the bishops stronger backing for taking the necessary actions to address the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood, which unfortunately will be a difficult project from a public relation standpoint in our society. Nevertheless, what is important is that each individual bishop, unlike the review board members, must recognize and accept the clear and primary role that homosexuality in the priesthood played in this enormous scandal, and with courage act accordingly to minimize the possibility of such problems within his own diocese in the future.